Story #1 relates another bad week for Obama and the Democrats. #2 tells of the enormous misstep by the Democrats attacking Ann Romney. What they failed to remember is she’s a women and there are a lot of women who stay at home. #3 looks at the youth vote and how important it is to Obama. #4 Jack Welch doesn’t have much good to say about POTUS. In #5 Alan Dershowitz looks at the Zimmerman case and sees a lot of holes in the prosecutors charges. #6 asks where our cheap oil has gone. #7 looks at what the Democrats call a moderate at least in Maine. #8 shows the stupidity of the environment movement.
Today’s thoughts
The Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney kerfuffle appears to have been bad for the Democrats. After making inroads claiming the Republicans were anti-woman, they stuck their foot in their mouths attacking stay at home moms.
Being the Press Secretary has got to be one of the most difficult jobs in the world. You have to pretend to be a knowledgeable idiot.
Obama’s campaign to have any chance at all must be perfect and not make any missteps. It’s not off to a very good start.
Liberalism having captured the press seems to have lost its edge. Liberalism seems to be trapped with the positions and arguments from the 1960s.
1. Obama has another bad week
I was not surprised that left-leaning pundits, who gleefully tried to tar Mitt Romney with Rush Limbaugh’s comments, would be scornful of the notion that President Obama should be responsible for the remarks of Hilary Rosen, a former strategist and frequent White House visitor. (Limbaugh doesn’t even like Romney all that much.) Certainly, Michelle Obama, David Axelrod and Jim Messina — who weighed in to defend Ann Romney — all were concerned that the public wouldn’t buy such a transparent double standard. Even the President got into the act.
Aside from the rank hypocrisy by liberal spinners, the issue is not whether Hilary Rosen is a campaign operative (she isn’t). It is whether the comments touched a nerve with stay-at-home mothers, including conservative women and social conservatives, who had been lukewarm to Romney heretofore. From the immediate reaction yesterday it seems to have done that.
Liberals might not fully “get” it, but social conservatives and stay-at-home mothers (think of Sarah Palin’s core fan base) feel elites denigrate and even mock them. They resent a feminist being defined as “a pro-choice career woman.” This is a sore point with these voters. Give Axelrod and company their due: They understand this phenomenon.
But the damage may go beyond that. This was a week in which the once pliable national media pretty much called out a key campaign plank — the Buffett rule — as nothing more than a gimmick. So two gimmicks — soak the rich and paint Romney as anti-women — blew up in the White House’s face. And then my colleague Glenn Kessler pretty much shredded Obama’s invocation of Ronald Reagan to push his tax scheme. Kessler wrote: …
As I mentioned in the thoughts for today, Obama has to run a perfect campaign. He isn’t.
2. Obama and Women
Until Thursday, it had been a pretty good week for the Obama campaign.
In the newly-declared battle to frame the general election, the president seemed to be winning. His "Buffett Rule" proposal - designed in part to define presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney as seeking to protect low tax rates for the one percent - was dominating the political news cycle. Meanwhile, the Romney camp was scrambling to find some way to win over women amid polls that showed Romney trailing the president by double-digits among female voters.
Then, on Wednesday, a gift from Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen: A criticism of Anny Romney, a stay-at-home mom, as someone who "has actually never worked a day in her life" and thus isn't qualified to advise her husband on women's issues.
It was the perfect opening for the Romney campaign - a chance not only to appeal to women but to shift the focus from the Buffett Rule. And the campaign pounced. Ann Romney joined Twitter to state that raising five sons was "hard work." Romney senior adviser quickly Eric Fehrnstrom pushed the issue on his Twitter account.
The Obama campaign tried to contain the damage, with Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod deeming Rosen's comments "inappropriate and offensive" and campaign manager Jim Messina calling them "wrong." By the following day, the president and first lady, along with the vice president, were all criticizing the comments. But it was too late: The story was dominating the headlines by Thursday -- helped by the Romney campaign, which sought to tie Rosen's comments to "Obama's Women Problem" -- and prompting an embattled Rosen to apologize in order to try to keep the controversy from dominating another 24-hour news cycle.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57413355-503544/hilary-rosen-flap-a-win-in-every-regard-for-gop-says-nicolle-wallace/www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57412674-503544/romney-camp-focuses-on-winning-over-women/?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Here’s the dirty little secret the MSM doesn’t want to tell you. Obama is doing everything he can to create issues aside from his record. But he is so weak that he must do it perfectly, or it falls apart. This was a good example. When everyone was talking about contraception (a nonissue), Obama was getting support from women. This destroyed everything he gained with the previous political trick.
3. Obama and the Youth Vote
…Four years later, Obama's in trouble, which is why he's visiting college campuses more often than a Red Bull delivery truck. He's talking louder and getting more shrill, because his campaign knows how desperately it needs to replicate -- or even come close to replicating -- his success with the youth vote in 2008. Polls and countless news stories indicate that young voters are either bored, unimpressed or disappointed with Obama, and with the state of the country.
All of the exciting reasons to vote for Obama are gone. Even his accomplishments don't excite people, never mind his failures. His "Yes, we can" rhetoric is gone because it sounds stupid after four years of "No, we didn't." Now we get cynicism and fear-mongering. His attacks on the Republicans are tawdry and desperate. He even admits the "Buffett Rule" is a gimmick. Other issues like green energy are passé now, even though gas prices continue to soar. (A troubling sign for Obama: Only a third of hybrid car owners are interested in ever getting another after they get rid of the one they have.)…
Obama’s problem is “fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.” I predict a good dose of apathy for the under 30 vote.
4. Jack Welch on Obama
President Obama’s “divide-and-conquer” approach isn’t what great leaders do, Jack Welch said Thursday. . . .
“It was the insurance executives in health care. It was the bankers in the collapse. It was the oil companies as oil prices go up. It was Congress if things didn’t go the way he wanted. And recently it’s been the Supreme Court,” he said.
“He’s got an enemies list that would make Richard Nixon proud.”
Welch, who helmed GE for 21 years and founded the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, penned an op-ed article for Reuters with wife Suzy Welch this week in which he tackled the idea of Obama’s enemies list.
“Surely his supporters must think this particular tactic is effective, but there can be no denying that the country is more polarized than when Obama took office,” Welch wrote.
Obama was supposed to bring us together. It appears that’s another campaign promise he has done just the opposite of what he promised (like reducing the deficit, keeping unemployment under 8%, creating 5 million new green jobs, etc.).
5. Dershowitz finds the charges against Zimmerman should be thrown out
Dershowitz called the affidavit justifying Zimmerman’s arrest “not only thin, it’s irresponsible.” He went on to criticize the decision to charge Zimmerman for second degree murder by special prosecutor Angela Corey as being politically motivated.(snip)“You’ve seen the affidavit of probable cause. What do you make of it,” Smerconish asked. “It won’t suffice,” Dershowitz replied without hesitation….
It appears more and more that the special prosecutor is playing to the mob. Dershowitz has special praise for the parents of Treyvon Martin.
6. What happened to Our Cheap Oil?
When I was in high school I learned that the price of oil in England was as high as $5.00 a gallon. That meant nothing to me because I lived in Manhattan and cars were totally unnecessary because of our superb public transportation system. Years later, living in Florida in 1972 gasoline was about $.24 a gallon. Today US gas prices are close to what European prices were decades ago and the question arises-What happened to our cheap oil? It didn't disappear. It's still here. We just can't get to it so why are we being held hostage to the whims of oil rich hostile nations? I'm no expert but the villains in this situation are the "Greenies" and our own stupidity for falling for their claptrap.
There hasn't been an oil refinery built in the U.S. since 1976, ironically the same year that Jimmy Carter was elected. He was responsible for the creation of the Department of Energy and the enabling legislation was passed and signed into law on August 4, 1977. Hundreds of billion dollars later with a budget of $24.2 billion a year, 16,000 federal employees and approximately 10,000 contract employees, we are no closer to being independent of foreign oil. That's how a bureaucracy operates - it produces nothing except a mechanism to drain money from taxpayers. Rick Perry was right; this is one of the agencies that should be scrapped.
As John Stossel says in his new book, “No the Government can’t,” but free people can.
7. Is this what moderate means in Maine?
Rep. Chuck Kruger (D-Thomaston), the Democrat chair of the Maine legislature’s Moderate Caucus, used his Twitter account to express his view that former Vice President Dick Cheney should be executed. This comment has led some to question the validity of Kruger’s moderate credentials.
Kruger made the statement through his Twitter account this past summer, saying, “Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams,” a reference to technology that would allow Kruger to watch the proposed execution of the former Vice President of the United States….
I’m not sure what language would allow you to call for another person’s death and call yourself a moderate.
8. Wonder why liberals can’t control spending?
The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045 billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009.
“In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. “The plant’s location was directly in the footprint of a roadway improvement project designed to upgrade the seismic and structural integrity of the south access to the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The translocation of the Arctostaphylos franciscana plant to an active native plant management area of the Presidio was accomplished, apparently successfully and according to plan, on January 23, 2010,” the Interior Department reported.
The bush—a Franciscan manzanita—was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries for as little as $15.98 per plant. The particular plant in question, however, was discovered in the midst of the City of San Francisco, in the median strip of a highway, and was deemed to be the last example of the species in the “wild.”
Prior to the discovery of this “wild” Franciscan manzanita, the plant had been considered extinct for as long as 62 years--extinct, that is, outside of people’s yards and botanical gardens…
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/shovel-ready-san-fran-205075-translocate-one-shrub-path-stimulus-project
These people really should be put into homes where they can be protected from hurting themselves or America. What utter stupidity.
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